Does the Internet strengthen democracy?
Will we soon be able to elect his mayor or his deputy by pressing the mouse? Should the Chinese or North Korean governments be shaking with the web's arrival in their country? Seven personalities from the media, politics and the internet deliver their answers.
Who forgot the dazibaos broadcast in 1989 on the web by Chinese students fighting against the Beijing regime? Agora open to all the winds, the Internet is not only a formidable tool of protest against all the dictatorships. It is on the way to revolutionizing the political and social life of our democracies. Groups of opinions are flourishing on the Net, some of which, like the association Attac, are the crucibles of a true cybermilitantism. Other movements take the form of virtual unions to criticize the methods of their company: the French video game maker Ubi Soft has experienced it a few months ago. Finally, the latest innovation is e-voting. It was established in Arizona, then in Belgium and the Netherlands during the last European elections. Is the Internet about to change democracy? Sébastien Canevet (internet law specialist, Doctor of Law, Professor at the University of Poitiers and Paris-X-Nanterre) : I would even say that he is revolutionizing it! For the first time in the history of mankind, an isolated individual equipped with a miserable computer and a telephone line can compete with a multinational or even with a state! With the Net, people are discovering a new way to express themselves and mobilize themselves. Watch in Austria: all anti-Haider campaigns are orchestrated from the web. And no one has forgotten the electronic tracts sent from the jungle of Yucatán by sub-commander Marcos, leader of the Mexican Zapatista guerilla.Will local democratic life also benefit from the rise of the Net? Patrick Devedjian (MP for Hauts-de-Seine) : I am very happy to respond by e-mail to my interlocutors and to collect their spontaneous reactions, far from any protocol. I find it formidably democratic: it is the end of secrecy, censorship, and the system of caste or privilege. But beware ! Do not be naive. First, not everyone is connected. It creates a new discrimination and it is not a question of income, but of motivation and often of generation. Then, the contact is not so direct and so true that this: nothing replaces a personal interview to understand well. Finally, there is a form of lobbying, not uninteresting, but one really does not have time to answer. Michel Hervé (mayor of Parthenay, a digital city that multiplies initiatives to connect citizens to local life) : Let us be lucid. The Internet is only one communication technology among others: it is not, in itself, democratic. What counts is what the citizens and elected representatives of the nation want to do with it, especially for local democratic life. For example, Parthenay has set up teleprocedures that allow citizens to obtain papers, enroll their children in the crèche, school or canteen and interact with the municipal administration on Concrete urban planning, public facilities ... or household waste. The Net will be democratized by these modest microactions. Laurent Jesover (head of the association Attac) : Let us not forget that the Internet is first of all a formidable machine to inform.Used as a tool for citizen action, it allows to transmit to the general public an ocean of texts little or not disseminated in the main media: reports of NGOs, legislative texts, unavoidable statistics ... Not to mention the in-depth analyzes of Financial, economic or social mechanisms carried out by attentive observers and too little listened to. I call it the "Dracula effect":
The power to disseminate universally and cheaply a dump of hyperpoint information usually confined to small circles of experts in the pay of states and major international organizations. Can we really talk about the birth of a cybermilitantism? Laurent Jesover: Yes, the Net is the weapon of the cybermilitant! Besides, all the networks that act on the Net? "From Amnesty International to Iris via Vecam?" Are born of exchanges between small curious people who do not let themselves count on thanks to the mailing lists accessible to all. Attac counts, for example, 500 translators and 300 volunteer experts to track the offenders in international finance ... Meryem Marzouki(founder of the Iris association) : The Internet offers important means of meeting the components of the Civil society: militant networks, trade unions, government sites, etc. It helps to implement new modes of resistance, opposition, even subversion to respect the fundamental rights of individuals ... Valentin Lacambre (member of the collective "Your papers" and host of the free site altern.org ) : The totalitarian countries are well aware of this: look at what is happening in Morocco: five years ago, the 100,000 telephone lines were all tapped, the press was muzzled, and then the web turned everything upside down In all the dictatorships of the world, the diffusion of the Net poses a problem: how, in fact, to preserve power if the least of your turpitudes becomes public? Hence the perceptible anxiety of China and Of Russia at the moment ... Electronic voting, a great dream of direct democracy, is bogus Valérie Peugeot (responsible for the electronic communication of the association Vecam - European watch and citizen on the information superhighways And multimedia) : Some cherish the dream of establishing a direct democracy where everyone would express themselves while pressing the key of a keyboard. And by short-circuiting at the same time representatives and assemblies of elected officials. Specialized companies got into the breach, like election.com, which organized the Democratic party primaries in Arizona ... But we must distinguish between electronic voting and simple online participation. Voting in virtual polling booths in public places during elections is a matter of electronic voting. This purely technical solution, which would not require any revision of the electoral code, could simplify the election process, perhaps even limit abstention. And, ultimately, electronic voting would improve the functioning of democracy, based on a pure and hard representative model. Online voting, which involves getting people to express themselves on the death penalty, the price of gas or the winner of a stupid game, is a matter of plebiscite, survey or marketing study. It has nothing to do with my idea of democracy. Valentin Lacambre: Besides, we can not exclude the possibility of "stuffing" of the ballot boxes, even easier to achieve on the Net than in real life! Michel Hervé: I totally agree. Solicited by the European community to experiment with such a system, I have refused to set up it in Parthenay. I also consulted the Ministry of the Interior on this subject: he confirmed that the Electoral Code prohibited such procedures. Sébastien Canevet: Right, in my opinion! Deciding for or against a political or societal issue by pressing a button is an act of extreme passivity. The citizen deserves better than that! Is one, moreover, free from his opinions, when one does not express himself in the secret of the polling booth? Yet, the Net is still a formidable tool for free expression? Laurent Jesover: If there is an internet revolution, it is at least ambiguous: on the one hand, individuals have an unprecedented means of action on major national and supranational institutions. On the other hand, censorship and legal barriers fueled by countless legal proceedings against content providers and Internet users are increasing. An example ? The recent Napster case (a system allowing millions of Internet users to share music, recently attacked in court). They are orchestrated by states and companies whose financial and legal resources are out of all proportion to those of ordinary citizens. Meryem Marzouki: The Net, free expression tool? Let us beware of the lure of direct democracy. To believe that it would be enough to click to express oneself is the surest way to kill the real exercise of the democratic process, whose expression by the vote is only the culmination. This lure is all the more dangerous because a logic essentially merchant takes possession of the Internet, threatening to reduce the space citizen to a sort of reserve for initiates. The rest of the web being left to the "target consumer". Do you think that the right of expression on the Net is in danger? Valentin Lacambre: Yes. I am convinced that if newspapers such as Charlie Hebdo and Le Canard enchaîné were broadcast on the Net, they would inevitably be sued ... Today, talking about a brand on the Internet means almost condemning itself, Advance! Sébastien Canevet:The issue of protecting online freedom of speech, privacy and consumer protection is central. There is often talk of censorship exerted by post-Soviet Russia, which passes access to the web of its access providers through a black box, Sorm, controlled by the FSB, the former KGB. But do we know that in England the Rip Bill obliges the access providers to connect their network to black boxes of the secret services? And, in France, we control the web?Meryem Marzouki: Our country has also failed to put in place legislation of exception, fortunately countered in extremis by the Constitutional Council. In the general indifference, a draft law defining the duties of communication companies was voted at the beginning of the year. It stipulated that any citizen wishing to publish on the web or to participate in a discussion list, a forum or a news group, was obliged to give his name, first name and address to his host! The spectrum of generalized files was not far off ... Any law regulating public expression must nevertheless be the subject of a wide public debate. Especially if it challenges the gains made in respect of privacy of individuals. Do you really think that citizens are afraid of the impact of the internet on their privacy? Michel Hervé: Do not pack. Just to convince people to use the internet, you have to fight. In Parthenay, it was necessary to equip the classrooms, to offer the citizens to equip themselves with multimedia computers for a small fee, to multiply digital terminals in public places, to organize free trainings to the internet tool, to offer services of Proximity and open to the public a web portal so that the mayonnaise finally takes.
Jean-François Paillard
published on 30/10/2000
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